OpenStreetMap: A Year of Edits

London, UK

Sunday, January 1st 2012, 00:00 GMT

In the past weeks I've been working on some visualisations related to additions and changes being made to OpenStreetMap. To start of the new year, I hereby present: OpenStreetMap: A Year of Edits (2011):

This animation is all made with Open Source software. I haven't had the time to clean up the code to make it releasable yet, but I am intending to do that in the near feature and add it to my OpenStreetMap tools git repository on github.

With a script, I scanned over all those XML files and for every three hours I created an image showing the edits of those last three hours (in white), as well as all the other edits in the background (in purple). With 4 frames per day, this gives me 1460 frames.

Each of the frames is an equirectangular projection which I then map onto a sphere with a faded background of "earthmap10k" of http://planetpixelemporium.com/earth.html (I downloaded it years ago when it was still free to download). For the 3D rendering of the Earth with the edits layed on top of it I used POV-Ray.

I generated two different loops so that I can make two full rotations at different angles. This gives me in total 2882 frames which is about two minutes. The POV-Ray generated images I post-processed by overlaying the progress bar in the lower left and added the fading and merging effects. Then I used mencoder to create a MPEG video out of it. Finally I added the sound track again by using mencoder and uploaded it to Vimeo.